Hegelbabble
I have come to the conclusion that Hegel was playing a big prank on the rest of the academic world, but died before he could reveal that he was just spouting gibberish. This is absolutely incomprehensible. You have as much context here as anyone - this is the opening of a chapter in Reason in History called “The Idea of Freedom.” These terms with capital letters - Spirit, Freedom, Matter - are all capitalized for no clear reason, and are certainly never defined earlier (or, for that matter, anywhere else in the text).
The nature of Spirit may be understood by a glance at its direct opposite - Matter. The essence of matter is gravity, the essence of Spirit - its substance - is Freedom. It is immediately plausible to everyone that, among other properties, Spirit also possesses Freedom. But philosophy teachus us that all the properties of Spirit exist only through Freedom. Al are but means of attaining Freedom; all seek and produce this and this alone. It is an insight of speculative philosophy that Freedom is the sole truth of Spirit.
Matter posesses gravity by virtue of its tendency toward a central point; it is essentially composite, consisting of parts that exclude each other. It seeks its unity and thereby its own abolition; it seeks its opposite. If it would attain this it would be matter no longer, but would have perished. It strives toward ideality, for in unity it exists ideally. Spirit, on the contrary, is that which has its center in itself. It does not have unity outside of itself; it is in itself and with itselff. Matter has its substance outside of itself; Spirit is Being-within-itself (self-contained existence). But this, precisely, is Freedom.. For when I am dependent, I refer myself to something else which I am not; I cannot exist independently of something external. I am free when I a, within myself. This self-contained existence of Spirit is self-consciousness, consciousness of self.
-Hegel, Reason in History
That is just a series of nonsequiturs. I particularly love the section on how matter “seeks its own abolution” and “strives towards ideality” because it has “gravity,” which is the opposite of Freedom.
Hegel’s writings have had a resurgence in the 20th century that, I think, accounts for the dreadful quality of current “postmodern” “writing.” Hegel was criticized in his own day as obscurantist - Schopenhauer wrote:
The so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, … it is a pseudophilosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage.
which I pretty much agree with. The staggering amount of babble in Hegel and his total disregard for clarity are really hard for me to get over. It should come as no surprise that some of Hegel’s biggest fans are Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, and Martin Heidegger.
Anyways, the worst part of all of this: my philosophy professor is a Hegel fanatic.
